As a remix evangelist, Björk has always celebrated the mutable quality of her work. "To me it goes all the way back to being in the Sugarcubes and Kukl before," she told Britain's Independent. She described how Iceland's half-arsed indie scene was suddenly electrified by the arrival of acid house: "Going to all those first raves, it was really obvious that there wasn't really one correct way of doing a song." That notion reached a peak on 2011's Biophilia, where, if the mood struck, Björk could have dispatched endless revisions of the record to the corresponding app (which always sounded more like a Synecdoche, New York-style nightmare than a healthy creative impulse). At home, her audience could tinker with the music at will.
Even though its predecessor was rooted in ideas around organic matter and mutation, this year's Vulnicura felt more like a living process than any of Björk's previous records. The tracklist was a linear path through the collapse of her 13-year relationship, and its devastating fallout. The liner notes dated the songs according to their distance from the emotional chasm at its center, embodied by the 10-minute "Black Lake". Its length reflected the difficult process of trying to articulate and move on from abstract, muddled pain, she explained, and her elongated vowels seemed to massage out that meaning.
Vulnicura Strings takes the record back to the very beginning of the process, where Björk threw herself into writing complex arrangements for strings as a way of coping after the split. The addition of subtly powerful beats added to the record's sense of rupture, evoking an arrhythmic heart and blowing circuits that left darkness in their sputtering wake. Removing them should result in a rawer incarnation of Vulnicura, but this sounds more like a suturing. The original's broken-ness is gone, in its place an undisturbed tragic whole.
Although some listeners may have found the electronic instrumentation distracting, Vulnicura Strings—a remake of the album using only strings, and jettisoning electronics—isn't necessarily an easier listen. It's more intense for the sense of space, which enhances Björk's cavernous, anguished vowels and sometimes accusatory tone. The ensemble's queasy, acidic qualities also stand out. These aren't always the original recordings, but closer mic'd takes, a subtle difference that gives the record a slightly uncanny quality, aided by the rearranged tracklist. The vast, trembling edifice of "Atom Dance" is stunning in isolation, while the spaces in "Black Lake" seem to linger even longer, with a kind of awkward tranquility. The lyrics are stripped out of "Family" in favor of highlighting its two piercing, frantic crescendos.
A lot of these songs didn't have hooks, per se, to start with. They expanded and contracted with a kind of cosmic swarm, the percussion providing a delicate skeleton. Loose as it was, without that punctuation, Vulnicura Strings can feel a little formless. A second version of "Black Lake" was performed in Krakow, Poland, on the world's only viola organista, an instrument designed by Leonardo da Vinci but not built until after his death. On a technical level, it's intriguing: a friction belt vibrates individual strings, which are selected by pressing keys on a keyboard. But as a listening experience, it's a bit arduous. The instrument has a rasping, atonal quality, and the spaces in the song drone on forever without offering much.
It's unlikely that Vulnicura Strings will replace anyone's original copy of the record—its existence feels more symbolic than anything else. Last week, NASA observed the supermassive black hole Markarian 335 emitting energy for the first time. "This will help us understand how supermassive black holes power some of the brightest objects in the universe," said astrophysicist Dan Wilkins. For Björk to return to the disintegration of her family once again and make something new from it, however successful it is, is further proof of the life that can be found in destruction.
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